Hyper-Public brought together computer scientists, ethnographers, architects, historians, artists and legal scholars to discuss how design influences privacy and public space, how it shapes and is shaped by human behavior and experience, and how it can cultivate norms such as tolerance and diversity.

As the first post in our series of recaps, we have collected:

(1) Urs Gasser, Judith Donath, and Jef Huang’s introduction:

(2) John Palfrey’s comments from the session on “Delineating Public & Private”:

(3) danah boyd’s talk from the session on “Experience & Recreation”:

(4) Adam Greenfield’s inputs from the session on “The Risks and Beauty
of the Hyper-Public Life”:

More videos from the conference will follow in the coming weeks.

(5) A few members of the Berkman Youth and Media team also put together a visual map of some of the difficult questions and challenges associated with speakers’ provocations:

The symposium was attended by much more than its 120 real life visitors as over 3000 tweets by more than 3200 unique twitterers* were thrown into the public arena hashtagged #hyperpublic. The conference was even briefly trending in the Boston area. … The Wordle cloud of the symposium’s tweets gives a nice visual summary of the main debate showing that privacy (concerns) dominated the conversation
online as well, followed closely by public versus private discussions and definitions.

As pre-inputs to the conference, David Weinberger, Judith Donath, and Wendy Seltzer offered inputs on various dimensions of the symposium’s framing:

As an introduction to the conference, Berkman’s Executive Director Urs Gasser offered substantive opening remarks, invoking the example of Google’s StreetView to highlight some of the legal, policy, and social tensions in designing privacy and public space.

During the event, Berkman community members David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged many of the discussions that took place during the day: